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Daily Link Building tactics to move the needle

I know most of you may frown upon this question, but to those of you who are still going after blog commenting, forum posting, Q&A sites (even if that means you're getting nofollow links), do you have any recommendations on a guide/blog post that describes how to create a daily "low level" link building program to supplement the higher level, relationship dependent link building that you're already doing?

5 Responses

I have clients that ask me this question (eg "how can I add quantity links to the quality stuff you're working on?") and I tell them to go ahead and do it if they're determined to do it, but the ROI of time spent is minimal in most cases. Some go ahead and do it anyways, which is fine in most cases as long as they're avoiding spammy practices and using branded anchor text.

Blog commenting, forum posting, and spending time answering Q&A sites can be effective and produce a good return - but the value is in the click-through, not the nofollowed links. They're rarely effective tasks to hire out to a VA unless that person has an understanding of your product and native English skills. You need to be able to provide value above and beyond the generic comments with an obvious link or cry for attention that most people use.

Here's one decent way to interact in forums, provide value, and see a decent ROI: http://pointblankseo.com/ecommerce-forum-link-building. Emphasis is on "interact" and "provide value" - without those two things you're just another spammer. The same concepts can be applied to blog comments and Q&A sites.

I agree with what Baldea says. SEO is a full time job, and if you are the only person doing it, as well as running your business, then you really won't have time to do it. I am also like Baldea in that I am usually the creator, manager, seo, etc of my online businesses, at least at the beginning.

I know it is not exactly an answer to your questions, but this information may help A few years ago I had my first successful online business, and I got to the point where I was spending all day on customer support, so I did not have any time to grow my business (which included doing SEO). At that time I read the book "4 hour work week". If you have not read it, I highly recommend it. There they mentioned something called Virtual Assitants. I was desperate, so I gave it a shot, and boy did it change my life. I know how a a staff of VA's taking care of the time consuming stuff, while I spend my time on Marketing and SEO (with the turbulence in SEO these days, I would not want to outsource the work to anybody cheap, and I still can't afford the real pro's).

I don't know if this is a step your business is ready to take, but it may help. I personally work with WhitePicket.net for my VA's (for full disclosure, I do have a relationship with them) but there are other ones out there. Just look around and find one that suites your needs.

I think we're on the same page. I'm trying to find good guides that provide some structure around the type of link building work I can send to a junior member of my team or outsource to a site like WhitePicket. What kind of work is WhitePicket doing for you?

As I mentioned, due to my fear of the "Google Slap", I do all the SEO on my businesses myself. And just to clarify I have multiple VA's with them. Depending on the VA they do different things. But some of their primary tasks are things like answering my customer service emails, some reporting duties, sending out invoice, simple website updates, research tasks among other things.

The best place to use a VA in my experience is for tasks that are respective but need a human decision making (i.e. you can't get a software to automatically do it for you). For example for the emails, I have some canned response, but it needs to be personalized each time (nothing looks worse than a canned response that does not even answer a clients question). I know some people who also use WP that use their VA's to update their e-commerce site inventory, and another that is having them do convert old scanned PDF documents into eBooks and HTML pages. Pretty much anything that can be done via a computer or a phone they can do.

Ok, it is starting to sound like a sales pitch so I will stop. But hiring a VA really was a turning point in my business so I do tend to preach about them. The other good thing is that most of the companies - WhitePicket.net included - do not require long term contracts. So you can try them for a month and if you don't like them, you can just end it.

We could talk about this subject endlessly and we still won't get to a point.

The fact is that for a "one person managed website" is just overwhelming to take care of all aspects (SEO, design, content, updates, copy-writing, marketing, customer support, etc). I'm saying this because I've spent a few years like that and it's just impossible. You can't stay in front of your PC 16 hours a day. :)

That being said, I'm in doubt when it comes to this "link building job". Okay, yeah, everyone say that we should do it, that is very important and so on, but the majority loose the main point of view: quality content.

You could do some research in your niche, create some comparison tools/data, come up with something new, interview someone and post all that on your website. Sooner or later, someone will be impressed by what you did and will eventually mention you in a comment, on a forum or even of his own website. Those are the links that counts.

If you really have time, you can use DigitalPoint forums, Yahoo Answers, SeoMoz forums, search for the latest news in your niche and participate constructively in some debates etc. But soon you'll realize that it doesn't worth the time.

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